I used the second option for a while because I ran across some advocacy from someone who thought that it was nice to give people who wanted the option of a slight performance increase a chance to get it.

I have since then drifted away from using it, and the experience of extending the test suite for Text::xSV (which used that interface) has convinced me that it is a complete PITA to work with unless you only want one scalar value.

(Yeah, yeah. I know how to use appropriately placed parens to force list context. To me tricks like that exemplify what people dislike about Perl.)